Buying a Condo in Harvard Square

The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into
his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough
to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
-- The First and Second Discourses, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I need a big two-bedroom apartment that will accept my dog within crutching distance of Harvard
Yard," I told the realtor. "I'm prepared to pay $2000/month if I have
to". "$2000/month, dog, hmm... you might be better off buying," noted
the realtor. This took me back to 1981. Graduate microeconomics at
MIT. I was the youngest student in the class. Sitting next to me was
Gerard McCullough, the oldest student. Gerard had been a reporter at
the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering the Carter presidential campaign.
Jimmy Carter had taken a liking to him and made him a deputy
Undersecretary of Transportation. After Carter got the boot, Gerard
decided to come to MIT to actually learn what he had needed to do his
job.

The class hadn't really started but Gerard already had his notebook on
the chair-desk and one of those huge fountain pens that you use for
signing treaties. It was leaking black ink all over the notebook and
Gerard's pants. He stared at it, stunned: "This is a $175 pen." I lent
him one of my BICs and we ended up becoming good friends. We used to
drive around Cambridge in Gerard's Fiat 134. This wasn't as boxy as the
more popular 128, but it was even less reliable. I commented on the
decrepitude of the vehicle. "Philip, I want you to promise that if I
ever get a Saab with a 'No Radio' sign in the window that you'll shoot
me."

That's how I felt about buying a condo. I lived with my grandfather.
When I traveled, I lived in my minivan and slept in a tent. I spent an
entire summer in Los Alamos living in the
forest. Condo ownership seemed too grown-up, too self-indulgent,
too yuppie.

Nonetheless, the rentals were mostly expensive and repulsive. I was
going to have to buy if I wanted something that I could tolerate. The
realtor showed me a couple of places in big buildings and then
5 Irving Terrace, #3.
Irving Terrace is almost the perfect street for
me. Cambridge and Kirkland streets converge on the back side of Harvard
Yard. The block between them is taken up by a beautiful stone church
and the rather badly designed Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Running between Cambridge and Kirkland are Sumner and Irving Streets.
These are moderately trafficked. Running between Sumner and Irving is
the almost completely untrafficked Irving Terrace.

Unit 3 is the top floor of what the realtors describe as "a charming
Victorian mansion." In Bethesda, Maryland where I grew up, this
would have been called "a crumbling wooden wreck that we're going to
tear down next week." It used to be rent-controlled so the previous
owner was able to buy it for $60,000 in 1980. He put $20,000 into it,
sort of renovating the kitchen and two bathrooms, but leaving odd notes
such as an old range and blue toilet. Also, instead of yuppie-heaven
hardwood floors, the place was broken-up pine floors overlaid with
office-building carpet.

One area where this condo couldn't be faulted was space and layout. The
1500 square feet includes two big bedrooms, a longish living room, and
then two connected smaller rooms that could be a dining room or a small
office. There is also a strange little loft above the living room.
Finally, the unit comes with a parking spot in the driveway, a storage
room in the basement, and a brick patio right next to the driveway.

The existing owner had moved out in October, 1995 and put the unit on
the market at $337,000. The broker said that he was newly married and
had moved in with his wife. He'd cut the price to $299,000 by June,
1996 so that was the price when I went to look in mid-July. Nobody had
ever made any kind of offer on the property. I bought my friend Hillary
over. She's a professional real estate appraiser who works for a
mortgage company: "It's worth 270; offer him 250." Hillary is
intelligent, attractive, well-built, and 6'1" tall. One doesn't argue
with Hillary. Nonetheless, I ventured "Hillary, this guy isn't going to
take 250. I have a complete model of what he is like. First, he is
greedy. He's greedy because he put a place on the market for $337k that
is only worth $270k. Second, he is rich. Only a rich person could
afford to let a $270k asset sit for a year. He doesn't really care
about the money; he just wants to be able to tell his friends that 'I
bought this place for $60k and then sold it to some foreign idiot for
$337k.' He will neglect to add that he had to leave it vacant for 5
years to get the price, but so what. It is all ego. This is America.
We think people are smart because they are rich. Look at Ross Perot and
Bill Gates. Rich people
reinforce their impression of themselves as geniuses by trying to cheat
everyone else. Anyway, the owner doesn't need to sell it because he
just married a rich lawyer who has a huge house in Newton and he is
living with her."

I made an offer for $262.5k. He countered at $289k. I upped my offer
to $267. Through the realtors, he countered at $275 and said that was
his final offer. On Saturday evening, the owner actually called me.
Since he is rich and would be humiliated if the whole Net knew that he
didn't manage to sell the place for twice what it was worth, we'll call
him "John". What I'd heard from the two brokers wasn't enough to
contradict the elaborate portrait I'd drawn from my imagination. But
here was a real person. We met at the unit on Sunday and talked for an
hour in the living room. It transpired that he was a computer
programmer just like me. He was the author of some popular
Macintosh software. So I was right about him being rich, but he wasn't
exactly the scum-sucking yuppie I'd expected to hate. John and I then
went out into the street where we ran into some neighbors: the woman
across the street and her 5-year-old Golden Retriever; the downstairs
unit owners who were planning to adopt a Malamute puppy in September.
We stood in the middle of the street for 15 minutes on this glorious
sunny day and not a single car came by to push us out of the way.
Perfect.

I walked back toward Harvard Yard. The house is half a block from a little park
behind the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I let Alex off the leash. We crossed one busy
street and then were alongside Memorial Hall (mentioned in Henry James's
The Bostonians) heading into the Yard. Perfect.

I loved the place. It would have been nice to have hardwood floors. It
would have been nice to be on the first floor after my operations when
I'm stuck on crutches. It would have been nice to have a little yard
connected to the house so that Alex could go out and pee unattended in
January. Nonetheless, I knew that anything else this close to the Yard
was going to be on a much busier street and just as expensive.

I didn't want to overpay, though. I might actually graduate and get
offered a professorship in California. I didn't want to sit on a condo
for a year hoping for a sucker to materialize. So I said, "$267k or I'm
moving in with my friend Richard in his Brookline mansion. You have to
decide soon because my Aunt Marge rented my old place to some Hungarians
for September 1."

John was unconvinced. $275k was his bottom line. Realtors had
persuaded him that he could invest a little more money in the place,
maybe drop down a new carpet, and get the full $299k or close to it. I
started making plans to move into Richard's house. I had, er, neglected
to tell John that Richard was planning on ripping out all the walls in
his house and installing air conditioning ducts. Nor did I mention that
sometimes Richard takes things apart faster than he puts them back
together. So I had some mixed feelings about moving in with Richard
even if he has been a good friend since 1982.

At this point John called Hillary. She apparently gave him a dose of
reality because 24 hours later he accepted $268.5k fairly graciously.
The brokers couldn't meet us so we closed the deal alone in a conference
room in Harvard Square. We were both wearing shorts and T-shirts.

When I got back home to Melrose every piece of furniture looked
different. My sofa, purchased in 1982 out in Palo Alto, had previously
seemed very comfortable. It was the site of my recuperation from
surgery, the focus of dozens of parties, the cradle and grave of a few
love affairs. Now it was just $275 of crane time to hoist it into 5
Irving Terrace #3. My 2000 LP records and 9 bookshelves of books made
me glower. The five Steelcase lateral files filled with negatives and
slides were particularly worrisome. I began to throw stuff out. I
filled my minivan three times and emptied it at Goodwill. I created a
minivan-sized pile of trash in my driveway. Still, I felt oppressed by
the remaining stuff and it all looked far too shabby to reside in a
$268,500 condo.

I called moving companies. I had previously found only one way to make
sure that a telephone call was not returned: ask a woman for a date with
the opening line "I am a graduate student." Now I know another: call a
moving company in Boston and say "I would like to move on September 1".

All the companies my friends recommended laughed. My Aunt Marge was up
from New Jersey and she worked the Yellow Pages tirelessly. Cosmo from
R.C. Mason showed up. It was a big firm with 65 trucks, an Atlas Van
Lines agent. No problem to move on August 29. I'd need 300 small
boxes, 9 wardrobes, 50 medium boxes, 50 mirror crates for my pictures,
and a 10 dish barrels. Interstate Commerce Commission rules allow boxes
to be used for two moves. He could get me all the boxes secondhand for
$212 delivered (another company had quoted me $800 for
new boxes). If I wanted them to pack, it would be $3800 and they
couldn't do it the last week of August. The move itself would require
four men and a 30-foot truck for ten hours. Total cost: $1500.

After building a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet comparing the net present
value of $3800 on August 29 to the cost of potato chips and Coke, I
decided to invite my friends to a packing party. My Aunt Marge was
scornful. "Your friends abandoned you a week after your surgery.
They're never going to come out here and slave away packing up all that
junk. You have to get Mason to do it."

Twelve people showed up on Saturday. Not all at once, but enough so
that we had an average of 6 people from 9 am to 8 pm. Packing was done
under a "if you like anything, take it" policy. Olin got the most
booty: a tube power amp, an air conditioner, and most of the windowsill
to which the air conditioner had been attached ("Tell the Hungarians
that all the really nice houses in America have these custom cut-out
windowsills. So much less boring that the standard straight ones").
Several people tried to claim Alex under this policy but I said that he
was non-negotiable. We got more than 90% of the house packed before
going into downtown Melrose for a lobster dinner at Turner's, a fabulous
restaurant marred only by its proximity to Starbucks.

And then you need a lawyer

With most of my possessions nestled in wrapping paper, my thoughts
turned to the closing and therefore lawyers.

Nolo Press publishes dozens of legal
self-help books. According to Nolo, you can get yourself a patent,
represent yourself in court, prepare your own will, and do many other
things. However, you apparently can't close a real estate transaction
without a local attorney. According to my sister down in Maryland, the
lawyers there will all do a closing for $99 because they are scamming up
a fat commission on your title insurance.

I called John Moos (pronounced "moose") at (617) 494-8808. He knew the
street and the couple downstairs. He wanted $850-1400 to do the
closing. Then there was another charge of $1000 for title insurance and
searching. I asked "is it so much more expensive the lawyers here
aren't pocketing a kickback from the title insurance companies?" He
said "Oh no. Lawyers here get the same kickback, but we also charge you
$1000 on top of everything else." I called a couple of other lawyers
and they all sang a similar tune so I hired Moos.

I'd hired a building inspector the day after John and I came to terms.
For $195 I learned that the garbage disposal didn't work, that two
windowpanes were cracked (though I only ever was able to find one), and
that an electrical outlet was wired with reverse polarity. John agreed
to fix the outlet, disposal, and cracked pane.

John told me he'd bought the disposal in 1991 for $135. It had a five
year warranty that had just lapsed. Did he say "This machine ground up
garbage for me and my ex-wife at an average cost of $25/year. I think I
got my money's worth?" No. Nobody ever got rich who didn't believe
that a $135 product should grind up his garbage until he is dead and
buried. So rather than swell out the balance sheet of the
In-Sink-Erator company with an extravagant replacement, John decided to
attempt a component-level repair of the 5-year-old device. This
involved a 45-minute drive out Route 2 to the parts warehouse where a
$22 switch was obtained. John related his shock and horror upon finding
that some old threads had been destroyed by five years of use. So he
had to go to the hardware store and get a correctly sized tap. He then
proceeded to tap new threads into the venerable ISE 17 and install the
$22 switch. Following this repair, the disposer would turn on if you
were very clever about turning the stopper/switch at exactly the correct
angle. It made a screeching noise that sounded like an F14 striking the
ramp of an aircraft carrier, a nice complement to the bathroom fans
which both sounded like F14s taking off.

Emptied of some remarkably nondescript furniture and equipped with a
disposal sure to last at least another month or two, the unit was ready
for closing. So we all met in Moos's East Cambridge office. John and I
were clad in matching black T-shirts and shorts. The brokers, two
well-kept older women with high-end outfits, hair and makeup, rolled up
in a new Mercedes and proceeded to admire Moos's quilts and furniture.
John found a $10 error against me in the final docs and then remembered
to extract a $100 check from me for the three rickety kitchen stools
(I'd figured they were included with the unit but apparently not). John
signed some affidavits. He swore that there wasn't any UREA
formaldehyde insulation in the unit. He swore that he wasn't the person
with his name who had declared personal bankruptcy in Massachusetts a
few years before. I swore that I'd been told about all the lead paint
in the house.

John signed a deed conveying the title to me and I signed over a
$243,819.85 bank check to "John Moos." He was going to pay everyone
else out of his escrow fund at 1 pm the next day. It occurred to me
that there was really nothing stopping him from depositing it in his
personal checking account, unplugging his Quadra 610, and taking the
next flight to Rio. Sometimes I guess you have to trust people, even
lawyers...

The Move

While I visited friends in Seattle, the floor guys ripped up the
carpet, put down 1/4" of cork, laid plywood over that, and then nailed
glorious yuppie-heaven red oak to the plywood. Eight huge guys from
DeathWish Piano Movers (whose owner drives a Taurus with the MA vanity
plate DTHWSH) spent 13 hours moving me in on August 29. After several
day of unpacking, I had the downstairs neighbors up for tea. I tried to
educate Sam, their 9-year-old, in how to be a really cheap rich person
by telling him the component-level repair of the garbage disposer story.
It was supposed to end with a flourish and the F14-striking-the-ramp
noise but it turned out that the machine wouldn't start at all.

Right after the Move

Here's my old furniture and dog in the
new space (snapshots with my Canon 14mm wide angle lens).

Reader's Comments

You know, at first I was really enjoying your
page, thinking "hmm.. there is some insight here.
And its a whiteboy giving this anti-Gatez
sentiment, and he even lives in the Northeast."
I nodded my head in solidarity to your anti-Gatez,
anti-mega-corporation hot air, and briefly had a
tiny spark of hope within me for middle-class
colleged whites and the general populous of this
country, thinking, perhaps racial stereotypes are
just that - stereotypes.

And then... you became everything you were at
first berating.
Look in the mirror, my friend. You are the
"yuppie scum" you speak of. Enjoy your
meaningless life of material collection, your
yuppie condo, and your hot-macho car or European
sedan. Hmm... maybe you'll find a modestly
attractive, practical, young white bride, have a
few kids, and then die, your children meanwhile
having completed your meaningless cycle.

I recently had my garbage disposal blow up too. It looked about as old as the house and had obviosly been installed wrong. I drove to sears. They had a 1.5 horsepower monster on display at the front of the isle for 139.95, but I didn't think I'd be able to carry it out to the car by my self. I got the 1/3 hp kenmore for 39.95 from the bottom shelf and installed it in about 45 minutes. It's much quieter than the old beast, and sounds sort of like the trash compressor on a garbage truck. Very nice.

Phil, your writing, as usual, is interesting even though I'm bored by the subject matter. I'm once again alarmed by the clash of tone/attitudes and the reality, that is, the CASH you have available. As the first rather venomous fellow wrote in this string, several minivans full of stuff and the purchase of a 1/4 mil house squash a lot of my respect. It's a neat trick, though; create an incredible identity (compassionate, resourceful, intelligent) and then tear it down with extensive bursts of self-pity/-indulgence. You're a lit. follower, from some of your other scribblings...check out Russell Banks' "Continental Drift."

I'm rather saddened by all the hostile comments I see on this page. Phillip Greenspun has done rather well for himself, and I'm always pleased to see that, but I don't think that affects his merits as a person one way or the other. He's very generous with the knowledge and software expertise he pours into his web sites, and I would bet they haven't shown much in the way of financial return. I think he calls himself a scum-sucking yuppie materialist as a way of self-satire, and I find it rather amusing.

For another look at the real estate world, see David's Dream House, an exploration into the world of cut-rate (or theoretically cut-rate) real estate in the Los Angeles area.

I recently moved to a newer apartment away from all the noise of the inner city. The total cost of moving was $60 and that was for the U-HAUL. Well the two not so bad things about the move was that my wife and I were the One Man his Wife and a U-HAUL, and secondly the move took about 5 days. We only had to move about 15 miles away. The good thing Is that we got rid of a lot of junk, and we did not have to worry about any of our stuff being stolen by movers. We moved the day after thanksgiving, and could not get a U-HAUL until 5 pm that evening. We did not think we had to reserve a U-HAUL prior to moving the day after thanksgiving, but surprisingly everybody else in the city that was planning to move, moved on that day. So advice is dont move the day after thanksgiving unless you believe you need to work off all that turkey you ate the day before. Well I wonder if Phil was more worried about losing one or several of his LP records or losing an MIT text during the move. Anyway moving can be tiresome but I would rather do it myself than pay $500 for some guys to dump my property in the middle of the floor at my new home. ..

I was in Harvard Square about two weeks ago and everyone there seemed miserable. Why didn't you get a place near Fanuel Hall? It was full of cheerful materialists.

My own perspective is that freedom is inversely proportional to number, size, and cost of possesions. Having got rid of my house, my wife, my cat, my furniture and my car I feel now free to contemplate the infinite.

Of course, I am now unfortunately filling up my apartment with camera equipment, so will probably never achieve Zen. I seek instead the exact correct amount of underexposure for my slide film as the key that will unlock the secret of the universe.

On the insinkerator web site, you can search for the "right disposer for you" where you can select how important quiet operation and long product life are to you. How thoughtful of them to produce the Badger 1 model for people who don't want quiet operation or long product life.
"Hi, I'd like to return this disposer because it's too quiet, -and don't you have a model that will fail sooner?"

I think the key to everything is moderation. When the pursuit of material objects and money becomes so great that one is willing to do anything (lie, cheat, steal, forced child labor etc.) it's over the top. There is a point where the amount of money a person has cannot even possibly be used for anything else but to enslave the people (i.e. Bill Gates being able to buy Romania, but not being able to utilize all of the assets personally). That is simply wrong.

In response to the quote from -- The First and Second Discourses, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Animals were the first ones to mark out their territory... and they still do it by leaving urine trails... I believe Rousseau was right... humans are about as civil as animals sometimes. (sigh)... so much for M.I.T grads...

It's funny how all you people are jealous of Philip and can't give this brilliant MIT grad and teacher a hand. I think a job well done. BTW he didn't ask for you to read his article on buying his new home. So if you knew it was going to be a boring topic. LEAVE :)

Repeat the Greenspun experience?- Greatly enjoyed this piece and the comments on it. If any reader would like to see the prices of similar condos near Harvard Square today: you're most welcome to browse my website, www.cambridgecondos.com Fred Meyer, Realtor, University Real Estate, Harvard Square (contributed by Fred Meyer)